Congress should fully fund land and water conservation

August 27, 2010

As an advocate for parks, recreation and conservation in our community, I was very pleased to see that the U.S. House included a provision in the recently passed energy bill that would provide full and dedicated funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

The conservation program provides funds not just for our national parks, forests and wildlife refuges but also matching funds for states, counties, cities and other localities to acquire and develop close-to-home parks, conservation areas and recreation facilities. Local governments also agree to keep the land purchased in protected status in perpetuity and to open park lands and facilities to the public.

For 45 years, a royalty paid by oil companies on offshore oil and gas drilling leases has provided hundreds of millions of dollars per year for this fund to make matching grants to states and localities to purchase and develop park land and wildlife refuges, protect wetlands and water, and build recreation facilities in local parks.

The fund has provided a continuum of conservation that has touched all Americans — from parks and playgrounds, where kids can play, to greenbelts and recreational trails that connect and enhance local communities, to state parks that provide hiking, biking and camping and help to sustain wildlife, and to federal public lands used for hunting, fishing and paddling and for our most pristine national parks and wilderness areas.

In Allentown, we have received matching grants totaling more than $1.2 million to complete numerous park and conservation projects, including Irving Street Park, Trout Creek Parkway, Jordan Park, South Mountain, Jordan Meadows, Keck Park and Bucky Boyle Park. In Pennsylvania, the Land and Water Conservation program has funded more than 1,400 projects, including acquisition of more than 82,000 acres of park land.

Without federal funding, these important park and recreation projects might not have been completed. But the program is not a handout — every dollar has been matched at least dollar for dollar by state, local and private contributions. The fund has helped provide more than $2.4 million to help improve the quality of life in Allentown.

Unfortunately, not all the money paid into the fund has been used for parks and conservation. In fact, in most years only a small percentage has been appropriated by Congress to states and communities. This situation could permanently change for the better, however, if Congress approves the energy bill passed by the House.

Congress has one more important thing to be done to this legislation, and that is to not only include full and dedicated funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund but also to ensure that the legislation includes a provision to distribute money equally between the states and federal government.

In the past 25 years, even though the fund has provided millions of dollars for conservation and recreation, the vast majority of that money — more than 80 percent of the total — has gone to federal projects and purposes. Congress should correct this inequity and guarantee that states and localities receive their fair and equal share of the appropriations.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund is supposed to receive $900 million per year — a drop in the bucket of offshore revenues that typically exceed $5 billion — but each year Congress has diverted much of the revenue to other purposes. Full funding has been appropriated only once in the program's 45 years, and the amount recently declined to a low of $138 million in 2007. This shortfall has resulted in a land protection and outdoor recreation backlog of unmet funding needs across our forests, fish and wildlife refuges, national parks and other public lands, including state and local parks.

As we have watched the environmental disaster of the BP oil spill, it is good to know there is one benefit for conservation coming from the drilling of oil and gas in U.S. waters.

I, for one, will reach out to our senators to encourage them to do the right thing when they return to Congress after Labor Day. They need to join with the House and pass legislation that includes full, dedicated and equal funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

Greg A. Weitzel is director of Allentown's Department of Parks and Recreation and a member of the governmental affairs committee for the Pennsylvania Recreation and Park Society and the National Recreation and Park Association.